AMA | March 2025

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the March 2025 Ask Me Anything edition of the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Before diving into the AMAs, I wanna mention two announcement kind of things. Not really announcements, two things, one announcement and one reflection, if you want to put it that way. The announcement is We have winners for this year's Mindscape Big Picture Scholarship. Uh I hope I've been flogging this enough. Probably I haven't, but this has been going on for a few years now. It's at bold dot org. So it's gonna keep going on. It's not ended, so you can still contribute. We solicit donations from Mindscape listeners to help Undergraduate university students uh achieve their dreams of studying big picture ideas down the road. So this is hosted by bold.org, which has scholarships and all kinds of things. If you go to bold.org slash scholarships slash mindscape, you can find ours and contribute to it. Or you can just go to our podcast homepage, preposterousuniverse.com slash podcast.

In the right hand column, there's a link that says Mindscape Big Picture Scholarship. Click on it and you get all the info. So we've been super successful. Thank you so much for contributing. We've been very successful at getting donations, so much so that each year, the current plan is we can give two Scholarships worth twenty thousand dollars each. Which is not enough to send someone to college entirely, but makes a big difference to someone who's just trying to pay that tuition for school, especially if You're not planning to go in some area that is super financially remunerative down the road. And I'm very happy to announce this year's winners. One winner is Jillian Kate from uh she's already a undergraduate enrolled at Auburn University, and she's studying biochemistry. Biophysics, molecular biology, with the goal of becoming a college professor and doing research in those areas. And one line that

caught my eye from her application was that she's already planning not only to be a professor, But what kinds of courses she's gonna teach as a professor. So Jillian says, My goal is to one day teach biology in a south eastern university, and when I teach introductory courses, I hope to intertwine creativity, philosophy, and art into my lectures and course content. That certainly sounds something like something we could use more of in academia, so I'm all in favor of that. Other winner is Miles Webb, who is uh senior in high school and looking at different universities to go to. wants to study computer engineering, material science, chemistry, and physics. And uh one of the lines in his application was, A dream of mine is to become the first black Nobel Prize winner in physics. Part of me says, you know, I hope you're not Miles, because I hope someone else is, even before you get there. But if Miles is the first Black Nobel Prize winner in physics, I hope he gives a shout out to Mindscape listeners in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech because we have given him a little bit of a boost in paying for that college education along the way. Again,

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